SPACE: SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket – the Full StoryTim Urban | Wait But Why“Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and unveiled the first real details about the big fucking rocket they’re making…Right now we’re all on Earth, which means that if something terrible happens on Earth—caused by nature or by our own technology—we’re done. That’s like having a precious digital photo album saved only on one not-necessarily-reliable hard drive. If you were in that situation, you’d be smart to back the album up on a second hard drive. That’s the idea here. Elon calls it ‘life insurance for the species.'”

QUANTUM COMPUTING: Biggest Ever Quantum Chip Announced, but Scientists Aren’t Buying ItJames Vincent | The Verge‘”There was only ever a hope that a quantum annealer would be better,’ Matthias Troyer, who co-authored the 2014 Science paper, told The Verge. ‘It turns out that at least for the architecture implemented by D-Wave, [the computation] can be mimicked very efficiently on a classical computer.’ Troyer says that simply doubling the number of qubits in its chips will not help D-Wave overcome this problem. ‘We don’t have any evidence of quantum speedup in this architecture and building a bigger machine will not help that.'”

PHYSICS: A Nonlinear History of Time TravelJames Gleick | Nautilus“The paradoxes multiply almost as fast as the time travelers, but when you look closely, they are all the same. There is just one paradox, wearing different costumes to suit the occasion. Sometimes it is called the Bootstrap Paradox—a tribute to Heinlein, whose Bob Wilson pulled himself by his bootstraps into his own future…All the paradoxes are time loops. They all force us to think about causality. Can an effect precede its cause? Of course not.”

ENTREPRENEURSHIP: We Need to Expand Our Definition of EntrepreneurshipJohn Hagel III | Harvard Business Review“In a world that is increasingly shaped by exponential changes in technology, new opportunities are arising at an ever more rapid rate. But risk also increases because of accelerating change and increasing uncertainty. What we need are entrepreneurs who are willing and able to cope with those risks and to see and harness the opportunities on the other side.”

Alison tells the stories of purpose-driven leaders and is fascinated by various intersections of technology and society. When not keeping a finger on the pulse of all things Singularity University, you'll likely find Alison in the woods sipping coffee and reading philosophy (new book recommendations are welcome).